Wu Dar-Kuen 吳達坤

“I’ve tried to induce the sense of being in a maze that you get in the city.”

Born Taipei, Taiwan, 1974

Wu Dar-Kuen’s fascination with digital media is informed by his reading of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin argued that cheap colour printing, photography and film had transformed our relationship to artworks by destroying the magical “aura” that once surrounded them. Films epitomized this change, he thought, because their constant, seamless changes disrupt our psyches and make detached contemplation impossible. Like many contemporary artists, Wu Dar-Kuen believes Benjamin’s ideas are doubly valid in the digital age. Mi-Lou Tokyo (2008) is one of a trio of works in which brief videos of street performers are shown on several screens at once. The video sequence is directly influenced by viewers’ movements, which are picked up by sensors in the gallery space. The multiple cascades of colour and motion are designed to induce a sense of “vertigo” which for the artist is the normal reaction to urban life. (Mi-Lou means “a maze of buildings”.)